My name is Matthew Flaming and this is my vanity website.

To be more precise, this website is a scattershot collection of things I've written, random thoughts and moments of inspiration, interesting things I've stumbled across, photographs, links to related or occasionally unrelated materials, and other miscellany.

The fact is, although I've spent a fair chunk of my adult life creating and consuming content on the internet, the web has never been a medium I've preferred for self expression: my thoughts don't really work that way, in terms of hyperlinks and blurbs and the general everything-at-once agglomeration that is the online world. Whatever the reason, what you'll find here is a collection of bite-sized pieces with little continuity guaranteed. Call it the nature of the beast. So in that spirit, a few facts about me:

• I was born in Los Angeles, where my sister still lives; you can find her website here.
• I went to a lefty liberal arts college in Massachusetts, one that was mentioned by Bret Easton Ellis in The Rules of Attraction.
• What I wanted to be most, when I grew up? A lighthouse, a bulldozer, a car designer, a writer.
• Some movies I like a great deal: The Rules of the Game, Sunset Boulevard, Bladerunner, Withnail & I, Le Samourai, Ratatoille, Spirited Away, The Maltese Falcon, Badlands, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Network, Dead Man, Point Break, and Hudson Hawk.
• Hobbies: cooking, speculating about technology ventures that I'll never get around to starting, fighting with the dog.
• I lived in Portland, Oregon for seven years; in many ways, it remains my favorite city. My wife and I met in a class on Jewish "Magic and Mysticism" at Portland State University.
• What interests me? The way that stories shape the basic facts of our lives and our perception of the world. (Formally, epistemology and the narrative act.) The effects of technology and mass communication on culture. Unexpected still moments. The distance between science and faith. The perils of everyday existence. New things.